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By,
Marco Chiappetta
and Chris Angelini
February 10, 2003
We also did some
video encoding with the Athlon XP 3000+ and other test
systems. We took a
19MB, standard MPEG 2 format video clip of a classic TV show and converted it to DivX
format using the v5.02 of the CODEC installed (Note: We
ran this same test with the most recent version of the DivX
CODEC, v5.03, and saw a huge drop in performance, so we
reverted back to v5.02). Here are the
results.
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XMPEG Encoding Benchmarks
&
Comparisons |
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Video Encoding |
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XMpeg is a multi-threaded
application that really demonstrates the benefit of Intel's
Hyper-Threading technology found in the P4 3.06GHz. To put
it simply, Hyper-Threading makes one physical CPU appear as
two virtual processors, which allows it to process two
threads simultaneously. The P4 2.8GHz also performs
very well in this test, outpacing the 3000+ by over 12FPS.
The 3000+ is only slightly faster than the similarly clocked
2700+, it appears XMpeg doesn't benefit much from the
increased L2 cache available on the 3000+.
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ZD Business & Content Creation
Winstones |
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Simulated
Application Performance |
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To test "Real
World" application performance, we used ZD Labs' Business Winstone 2002
v1.0.1 benchmark. We'll
directly quote ZD's eTestingLabs website for an explanation
as to exactly what this test is comprised of:
"Business Winstone is a system-level, application-based
benchmark that measures a PC's overall performance when
running today's top-selling Windows-based 32-bit
applications on Windows 98, Windows 2000 (SP2 or later),
Windows Me, or Windows XP. Business Winstone doesn't mimic
what these packages do; it runs real applications through a
series of scripted activities and uses the time a PC takes
to complete those activities to produce its performance
scores."
The Business Winstone tests include:
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Five Microsoft
Office 2002 applications (Access, Excel, FrontPage,
PowerPoint, and Word)
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Microsoft
Project 2000
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Lotus Notes
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WinZip 8.0
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Norton
Antivirus
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Netscape
Communicator
The Athlon XP 3000+ scores it's
first real win the Business Winstone tests. The 3000+
squeaked past the 3.06GHz P4 by .4 points, and came in
almost 2 full points ahead of the 2.8GHz P4. Here, the
256K of extra cache really helps the 3000+ outpace the
2700+. The 3000+ was able to surpass the 2700+ by 13%
in this test, even though both CPUs were clocked at the same
speed.
Next we ran some
tests with ZD's Content Creation Winstone 2002 v1.0.1.
This benchmark series of scripted activities similar to the
Business Winstone tests, but the application used in the
Content Creation tests
are far more "bandwidth hungry". The
applications used in the Content Creation Winstone 2002
tests include:
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Adobe
Photoshop 6.0.1
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Adobe Premiere
6.0
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Macromedia
Director 8.5
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Macromedia
Dreamweaver UltraDev 4
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Microsoft
Windows Media Encoder 7.01.00.3055
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Netscape
Navigator 6/6.01
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Sonic Foundry
Sound Forge 5.0c (build 184)
In the Content Creation tests,
the Athlon XP 3000+ outperformed all of our other test
systems by a sizable margin. The applications and
routines executed in this benchmark benefit greatly by the
"Barton" core's increased L2 cache. The Athlon XP
3000+ surged past the P4 3.06 by over 11%, and beat the
2700+ by almost 17%.
SPECviewperf & Some Gaming Scores
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